Layla Curtis

TRESPASS

An app for iPhone

Layla Curtis has produced an app for iPhone entitled 'Trespass'. This app tells the story of Freeman’s Wood from the perspective of people who have used it. The artist held conversations with local people about their personal memories of this site and their speculations on its future.

In these interviews, members of the local community gave their responses to the landowner’s recent erection of a metal fence around Freeman’s Wood, along with accounts of how this, and the accompanying ‘Keep Out, No Trespassing’ signs, have affected the way the space is now used and accessed. Memories and accounts of how this land been used as a recreational space over recent decades are intertwined with discussions of wider issues of land ownership, trespass, territory, common land, and activism.

These conversations were conducted on site, and the sound tracks are GPS mapped, so users of the app can listen to the recordings while walking in the landscape they refer to, and following their movements on a map.

The conversations were recorded both outside and inside the area enclosed by the fence. Three audio tracks recorded outside the boundary are available to listeners anywhere. To access those tracks recorded inside the boundary fence, the listener must ‘trespass’, crossing into Freeman’s Wood itself.

The fence is not continuous, including a section beside the cycle path of a few hundred metres where there is no fencing, so it is easy for people to access the land.

The audio tracks on this app are compilations of several conversations and they form a lasting document of the local community’s long relationship with this piece of land. Even if this land is developed in the future, and is changed beyond all current recognition, this app will continue to map these stories onto it indefinitely.

Layla Curtis has commissioned Andrew Brown, author of "Art and Ecology Now", to write an essay about her app, entitled Creative Commons.

Layla Curtis

- is a British artist. Extensive travel has informed her work, which explores boundaries, both physical and metaphorical. Her early cartographic work, developed during a residency in Japan, is in the Tate collection. Layla's investigations into our sense of place have utilised digital technologies in trips to Antartica and the Borneo jungle, and in extreme sports.

Layla Curtis gave one our Talks on Art a couple of years ago, which featured her trip to the Borneo jungle. She was trekking with the Penan people, one of the last surviving hunter-gatherer tribes in South-East Asia. This trip was obviously good preparation for working in Freeman's Wood. Here is the film of that talk.